News

August 2019

The Same House, Twice. I loved learning about Grace McEniry’s architecture project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

“In this cabin intended to break down and wear out, the material and assembly logic is legible and clear to make renovation and repair part of the original concept. The project is meant to reference an old riddle: “I know a farmer who says he has had the same ax his whole life—he only changed the handle three times and the head two times. Does he have the same ax?”* How would this cabin be the same one hundred years from when it was built? I hope this project demonstrates an understanding of OSM as part of a continuum of people and places that allows for adaptation to life in one cabin over time …. *Concept and quote from: Mansfield, Howard. The Same Ax, Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age. University Press of New England, 2001.” You read more about the house here.

April 2019

One half the Mansfield/Montgomery duo reading at the Toadstool.

My favorite bookstore is in the next town, The Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough. It’s a thriving independent bookstore where I’ve seen many authors read. It’s where I always kick off my book tours because there will be a large turnout and thoughtful questions.

Willard Williams, who opened the Toadstool in 1972 with his wife Holly, told the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in an interview about the many writers who have visited his store:

Q: Over the years, what was the most memorable speaker and how did the audience respond to them?

A: I don’t want to slight anybody who didn’t, but certainly our most successful ones were Howard Mansfield and Sy Montgomery. They’re a couple who live in Hancock, and they’ve each written different kinds of books. Both of them, they’re lots of fun and lots of people come to hear them, too. They give great presentations….”

Thank you Willard and Holly for such a vibrant, important part of our community.

March 2019

March 2019

I am honored that one of my stories is a finalist for the City and Regional Magazine Awards (CRMA). The story, “Rising Seas,” was Yankee’s cover for March/April 2018. The CRMA said: “This moving report succeeds where many climate change reporters fail by engaging our emotions in a small snapshot of the world’s biggest story. This is powerful, outstanding writing.”

From the Living on Earth interview:

When I was in school, they would roll down these maps in front of the classroom. You know, a big map of the West, and you’d see the Louisiana Purchase, which is shaped like a big lamb chop, almost. And then you’ve got, you know, Texas — and then there’s this little flap of land or the end of the liver, as it was called it in its time. That’s the bottom of Arizona and New Mexico. That’s the Gadsden Purchase. It happened during the Franklin Pierce presidency, 1850s. It was bought after the war against Mexico, and it was bought so there would be a southern route for the Southern Pacific Railroad. It was completely a railroad deal.But here’s the thing about it. I went out to walk on the reservation of the Tohono O’odham. They’re beset with a lot of problems, high diabetes rate, high poverty rate, and the desert museum, the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum out there was having a walk to reestablish traditional diets. So, I walked with them a few days. And I’m as I’m walking along, I realize, Oh, my God, I’m walking in the Gadsden Purchase! And I thought, well, that’s really foolish. But on those old maps, there were no people, it was a blank space! But to Tohono O’odham, it’s holy space, it’s holy land, their sacred peak is there. But to us, it’s a blank space on a map, a way through to go someplace else. So, you have two different views of land: somebody’s land deal, and it’s somebody holy land. And there’s that clash.

December 2018

I get my very own state holiday. On New Hampshire Public Radio’s daily talk show, The Exchange, I was awarded a state holiday:

Dan Chartrand, owner of Water Street Bookstore: Sy has said—I’ve heard her say in public—that a lot of the underpinning and the theory behind her work preserving and appreciating the animals that live on this planet with us, is really based on her husband Howard’s work. Howard has written extensively about preservation and replacement. And why, when his books come out, don’t we all stop, in the state of New Hampshire, take a state holiday, and all read it at the same time? We should have a state book club. Every time Howard publishes a new book.–Dan

Michael Herrman, owner of Gibson’s Bookstore: We could call it Howard Mansfield Day

Dan: Exactly! This guy is the most under-read author in NH and he’s one of the most important authors.

Michael: It’s because he’s so hard to categorize.

Dan: Exactly!

Host: What shelf do you put Howard Mansfield on?

Dan: Let’s start with The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down. Let’s everyone just take a break, read this amazing book.

Oh, and I’m pleased to report that both booksellers picked The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down as one of the best books of the year.

Robert H. Thomas is a land use, eminent domain, and appellate lawyer who practices in Hawaii. He is also a visiting professor at William & Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Virginia. Thomas really likes The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down. It’s “a great read, and a perfect gift for those on your holiday lists,” says Thomas.

I enjoyed my visit with Peter Biello on NHPR’s show The Exchange. Listeners called in with good, challenging questions. Listen here.

September 2018

The first review is in for The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down:

The always eloquent Mansfield conducts an evocative foray into the history of American property rights in this slim but enormously prescient title. In a series of related essays, he takes readers from the arrival of the Europeans (who “defined the Indians by what they didn’t own”) to George Washington’s land speculation career with the Adventurers for Draining the Dismal Swamp (a slave-labor-based company attempting to drain a Virginia swamp) to contemporary struggles defending private property rights against pipeline and transmission line developers. While he crafts strikingly evocative portraits of the people he profiles (his essay on farmer Romaine Tenney, who sacrificed everything to fight against the interstate barreling across his land, is simply unforgettable), it is the scalpel like precision with which Mansfield homes in on the relationship between Americans and the land that proves most perceptive. He accepts all the complexities of his chosen subject yet is gifted with an unerring eye for the true heart of the matter. “American property is always in motion,” he writes, but it is also “our anchor and our North Star.” Who decides the best use of property? Who truly owns it? Powerful insights live on these pages, and Mansfield’s observations matter now more than ever.— Colleen Mondor, Booklist (starred review)

My new book has received its second review:

There comes a point early on in the reading of Howard Mansfield’s newest book The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down when you realize that you thought you understood what “property” meant, but in actuality, you didn’t. A point when you say to yourself: “Ok, I’m listening to what this guy has to say.” This book is a path-clearing work; the idea of property as most of us understand it has been occluded by so many branches consisting of conflicting ideas, legalese, lawsuits and the idea of eminent domain that one needs a person like Mr. Mansfield to clear away the brush and show us the path again. He does this admirably well in this, his tenth book.

… All of his narratives are clear and concise, and most importantly, eye-opening. Even life-changing… At 128 pages, The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down is a quick read, but it demands a thoughtful read. Parts of it should be read to your children so they understand the incertitude of what they are taught in school. Property is a fluid thing; it can never be truly controlled, as the native peoples of North America tried to tell the first Europeans who landed in North America. Five stars and highly recommended reading.— The Miramichi Reader

July 2018

I enjoyed my visit to the Canaan Meetinghouse Readings series which is run by Phil Pochoda. Phil is a retired publishing veteran (Simon & Schuster, Prentice Hall Press, Pantheon Books, University of Michigan Press, and the University Press of New England).

Thank you Phil for this fine and funny introduction:

I’ve always been fascinated by the work of field archaeologists who systematically and painstakingly sift through ruins or suspected ruins, digging with small implements, even using tiny brushes to clean delicate items. Then they attempt to make sense of their discoveries, and often manage to extrapolate from the unprepossessing shards or foundations or debris to the nature of the whole physical, social, cultural and political milieu and the lives of the inhabitants there years, centuries, or millennia ago.Howard Mansfield has always seemed to me a New England cultural archaeologist in just this sense, the Heinrich Schliemann (who excavated and discovered Troy) of our whole region, relentlessly digging through thoughtlessly or intentionally discarded remnants of past lives for clues to the sensibility, the values, the concerns of those who preceded him in this territory, leaving evidence that was unintended by them and generally disdained or misperceived by almost everyone else now and earlier, including, or especially, professional or academic New England historians.

Emily Dickinson famously instructed us to “tell the truth but tell it slant”, and Mansfield, whose writing is invariably evocative as well as descriptive, has long realized that our predecessors told their truths “slant”, not primarily through written records, but through inadvertent material remains. His evidence comes from how houses and rooms were constructed, furnished, decorated, expanded, and neglected; from what was and what wasn’t deposited in the many local historical museums that exist in so many towns, with collections often uncurated and uncataloged; from the fields and foundations and cemeteries that contain stone monuments and stone boundaries; from trees planted and trees memorialized in the town commons, fields and barnyards; from tools repaired and tools discarded; from many kinds of sheds built and sheds deteriorated. These are commonplace things not intentionally hidden but, as Howard has demonstrated repeatedly, their meanings are often hidden in plain sight. But, fortunately for us, he has painstakingly deciphered their languages, and is able to read from them – and read for us — the lives that made and used and repaired and discarded these particular objects, these personalized living spaces, these idiosyncratic enclosures.

Nor is this a disinterested quest: he delves so deeply and interprets so precisely because it matters to him profoundly how lives here have been lived, how lives are lived now, and even, though conveyed very gently, how lives should be lived. And his good news is that so many lives here have been lived well; have coalesced around appreciation for things well made, cared for, repaired and repurposed.

Howard’s originality of vision as well as originality of language was on full display in an early book, In the Memory House, published in 1993, for which he trekked to and through far too many dusty historical museums in far too many small New England towns to ascertain what got deposited and what didn’t, who was enabled to make deposits and who wasn’t, amounting to a diagnostic manual of local material memories and amnesia and the cultures they can reveal to an astute reader.

The Same Ax Twice (2000) took a different tack to much the same ends: this time looking at how and why common items from the past have been recovered, restored, renovated, and reused, items like tractors and axes, as well as buildings and community, all contributing, as Mansfield points out, in the sense of the Jewish Kabbalah, to a collective mending of the world.

The social sources and meanings of time itself was the central concern of Turn & Jump: How Time and Place Fell Apart (2010), in which Howard demonstrated the original local, regionally conflicting, nature of time, of the many disparate times in adjacent communities before the railroads forced the imposition of the standardized times necessary for the emerging regimented industrialized and bureaucratic economic order.

The title of his recent book, Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter (2113) informs us of its both humble and profound mission: to look closely at the houses and dwellings people have constructed and inhabited in order to determine what gives and what doesn’t give human shelters a life, what does and doesn’t create a haven, a soul.

Which brings us (though time forces me to skip other books that I adore) to the new book from which Howard will read this evening, Summer Over Autumn: A Small Book of Small-Town Life, in which Howard turns his attention from the deeper past of many of his previous books to the present of his adopted town of Hancock, NH where he has lived for thirty years with his wife, the great natural history writer, Sy Montgomery. Coincidentally, Hancock has been claimed by some to be the model for Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, but in Howard’s work, though infused with sentiment, you find none of the sentimentality of that play or of so much of the corny, misinformed, or propagandistic writings about small town New England life. Howard will present this new gem of a book himself, but on full display in it are all the qualities of close attention, conviviality, generosity, and wry wit that we have now come to expect. And we are never disappointed. As a great literary critic and stylist, Guy Davenport, wrote: “Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence.”

As for me, if they ever decide to restore the famous fallen granite visage of The Old Man of the Mountain — which they won’t, they can’t, they shouldn’t — my vote for its new face would be Howard Mansfield’s. There is no one I’d rather have permanently looking out upon us and looking out for us, perceptively, benignly, wisely. (Not least, I’d I love so see those eyebrows done in granite.)

Surely I don’t have to say anything more for you to understand what a great pleasure it is for me to introduce my old friend, Howard Mansfield.

May 2018

I am honored and surprised to find In the Memory House on writer Jim Rogers’ list of ten books that have made an impact on him. Jim Rogers wrote: “Not sure why I first picked up Howard Mansfield’s book In the Memory House (1993), but it is a jewel – a lyric meditation on the beauty of the nearby, the endurance of memory, and (this sounds way more ponderous than it is) on the phenomenology of living in a place, in his case rural New Hampshire. Howard Mansfield is a treasure whose essays and books deserve to be much better known.”

On Facebook, other readers joined in. The writer Rebecca Rule said, “It changed my way of thinking about old stuff. And I think a lot about old stuff.” New England College professor of art Inez McDermott said, “This book mattered to me, too. It got me out of the academic approach to art history and I began to teach, think, research and write in a more “holistic” (for lack of a better word) way.” And Leslie Rosoff Kenney said, “I also loved this book. Thank you, Howard.”

April 2018

Thank you Fritz Wetherbee for telling your loyal New Hampshire Chronicle viewers about Summer Over Autumn. Here’s what Fritz said:

Hands-down, the finest writer of Yankee life today is this guy, Howard Mansfield. Howard Mansfield sees things differently than most of us, and he points stuff out that most of us miss. Robert Frost had this ability to look at something familiar, say a leaf or a tuft of flowers and find a depth of meaning that, until we read the poem, eludes us. Howard Mansfield has written 13 books and lots of articles. But my recommendation, if you are not familiar with his output or style, is this: it is a modest book entitled Summer Over Autumn. This book is funny, this book is profound. I found myself saying, ‘darned if that isn’t true,’ a number of times. Characters here that anybody who has lived in a New England town for any time is familiar with; people who care, people who are selfish, people doing brilliant things, people doing dumb things.

Let me read a few sentences, give you an idea of what this guy does. “What we find in ruins,” he writes, “is a kind of melancholy. Free of clutter, free of us, a house gains stillness. It is a kind of stillness that we find on old country roads. It’s the skull under the skin, the skeleton, the death inside us. It’s the clock ticking our days away. We lack a good word for this kind of going away, this decay in which something else is present. Ghost or ruin doesn’t convey it. The Japanese call this feeling mono no aware, defined as the bittersweet sadness of things as they are, or a sensitivity to the fleeting beauty of the world. ‘You accept it, you even in a small way celebrate it….’”

Is that good or is that good?

Wish I had more time. Howard, by the way, lives in Hancock with his wife, another wonderful writer, Sy Montgomery. Talk about a power couple.

January 2018

Every Monday, The American Conservative’s editorial staff, along with some regular contributors, share with their readers what they have been reading. One of those books is The Bones of the Earth:

“Addison Del Mastro, assistant editor: I’ve been reading The Bones of the Earth by Howard Mansfield. I discovered this book while I was doing some research on the retail history of Route 22, one of New Jersey’s iconic post-war highway strips. It happened that Mansfield wrote a couple of pages about Route 22 here, and the kitschy midcentury signs and buildings there, some of which survive today.

“The Bones of the Earth is not, however, so much about historic preservation or suburbia, as it is about cultural memory and how we think about the past. Mansfield visits some old stone bridges in New England and ponders how they were built with no mortar, by masons who could tell from the shape of a stone exactly where in the bridge it needed to go. He also wrote about a tradition sparked by the now-defunct Boston Post, in which the paper distributed gold and ebony canes to the oldest residents of several hundred New England towns, and stipulated that upon death, the cane would be transferred to the next oldest resident. At the time of its writing in 2004, a handful of towns still participated in the tradition.

“When does a corporate sweepstakes like that turn into a genuine tradition? When does a faded neon sign of a smiling anthropomorphic bowling pin on an ugly highway strip meld into the nation’s cultural patrimony? Terms and ideas like “culture,” “historic preservation,” “the past,” and so many more have no clear definition and are based on many underlying assumptions. Mansfield wades into all of this to great, thought-provoking effect here.”

December 2017

Summer Over Autumn has been chosen by Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, N.H., as a Top 12 Nonfiction Book for 2017.

November 2017

Summer Over Autumn Leaf Contest. The winners are in!

A word from our judges (the author, a naturalist, and an artist):

“Dear friends, judging was rough. All the leaves sent in were both beautiful and poignant, and many were very creative: leaves under water, leaves on rocks, leaves with machinery, with feet, with ears, and even one with a (darling!) baby rat. All reminded us in some way of the cover leaf–and beautifully expressed the Summer Over Autumn demi-season that gave the title to the book. We want to thank all the contestants!”

1. Most poignant: “Prayer Flags” by Tianne Strombeck

2. Most beautiful: “Lazy Leaves” by Rana Williams

3. Most like the leaf on the cover: “Mid-September: Transition Time” by Dan Millbauer

September 2017

Virginia Prescott interviews Bob Fogg in the clock tower.

Hancock’s Bob Fogg makes his radio debut. Virginia Prescott from NHPR’s Word of Mouth interviews Bob about winding the Hancock meetinghouse clock for 50 years. Bob is in my new book, Summer Over Autumn. We’re both on Word on Mouth. Listen here. Bob is right at the start, and I come in at about 21:00 for a short interview.

3rd Prize: For the leaf most like that on the cover of Summer Over Autumn$10 gift certificate towards coffee/treats from The Hancock Market

Monday, November 21, 2016

Sheds – the TV show. Watch Monday for a short segment on Chronicle at 7:30. WCVB, Channel 5 in Boston or online streaming live. http://www.wcvb.com/chronicle

Saturday July 23 ~ Tour de Sheds 2016!

“Where I live,” opens Sheds, a new book by Howard Mansfield with photographs by Joanna Eldredge Morrisey, “we really have only one kind of building, old and new, big and small: the shed. From woodsheds to barns, to houses, meetinghouses, and covered bridges, they are all sheds.”

Through a fundraiser for the Hancock Town Library, locals and visitors can tour a variety of sheds in Hancock and environs on July 23. The event begins with a brief talk by Mansfield at 11 a.m. at the library, where the shed tourists will be provided with a copy of the book and a map to seven sheds. The sheds will be staffed by docents (aka “shedsters”) and open for viewing until 3 p.m. Tour participants are invited to meet up at the Hancock Inn at 3 to enjoy a Shed Brown Ale.

The tour includes a range of structures, from a sugar shack to a barn to a sculptor’s studio to carriage sheds – and then some. Tickets are $25 and include the talk, the tour, and a copy of the book, which is priced at $25.

January 2016

Some well-intentioned folks are issuing dire warnings that fireplaces should be outlawed. One crusader says that having a wood fire is like having a diesel engine idling in your house. I suspect this man wouldn’t know a dry cord of wood even if it were dumped on top of him.

All of this continues the long assault against the hearth, which I wrote about in my last book, Dwelling in Possibility. Jennifer Graham, a reporter for the Deseret News has done a good job presenting the concerns of various health advocates, and my reply about what we may lose:

If the rest of the country goes the way of Montreal, New York City and Berkeley, something essential will be lost, says Howard Mansfield, a New Hampshire author whose 2013 book “Dwelling in Possibility” defined the hearth as the heart of a home.

“When we lose the hearth, we lose the central gathering place of a home; we lose the shadows, the intimacy, the storytelling, the focus. We lose something that gives us permission to slow down,” said Mansfield, noting that the Latin word for “focus” is “hearth.”

Fire, Mansfield said, is our most ancient connection, a seemingly stable link between modern humans and their earliest ancestors. When humans moved inside, they brought the campfire with them and installed it in fireplaces and wood stoves. But the electric light and the furnace both freed families from cold and darkness and dispersed them to separate spaces, and nothing has quite replaced the fire as a gathering place, he said. (Except maybe the TV.)

“There is nothing like a wood fire. It makes the whole house feel different,” he added. “That’s a lot you’re asking people to give up.”

November 2015

Chronicle, WMUR-TV’s evening show, has done a fine preview of the Sheds photo book which will be published this March. Watch the short show.

I’m glad to see that Harvard Prof. John Stilgoe is using Dwelling in Possibility once again in his course this fall: Studies of the Built North American Environment since 1580. The book seen just above, Landscapes and Images, is by Stilgoe and it’s terrific. Thanks to Judith Copeland for the photo from the Harvard Coop.

June 2015

I am trying something new. I have published a story and photos on Atavist. Veterans Memorial Island is a story of the collision between peace and war, the American Dream and protest, children and parents. It’s a short memoir of a place and a time. Read it here.

40 over 40. The New Hampshire Humanities Council is celebrating their 40th anniversary by honoring 40 New Hampshire-based people who have “demonstrated what it means to create, teach, lead, assist, and encourage human understanding.”

I am honored to be among a group including poets Donald Hall and Charlie Simic, and filmmaker Ken Burns.

This is what the Humanities Council said:

“Howard Mansfield loves NH’s people. His writing connects everyday objects and the people who used them to what is meaningful in our world. Whether it is a simple axe used by a woodsman, or the hearth inside our home, or what we choose to have in our town historical societies, Howard illuminates the everyday with meaning. His words tell the stories of the common person and how they lived and constructed their lives in our state’s history. Howard not only gives voice to the people of our past, he gives of himself to the people here and now. Howard has served on historical societies, preservation groups and town committees. He is always willing to talk and share his insights with people through libraries, community centers and speaker series. He tells stories that make people laugh and feel ready to fall in love with their town’s own history. His book titles include, In the Memory House, The Same Ax Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age, The Bones of the Earth and Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter. Howard is a gem in our granite landscape.”

November 2014

It was pleasure to visit Laura Knoy at NHPR to talk about Thanksgiving on The Exchange, along with Emelia Attridge, staff writer with the Hippo Press, and Gerri King, social psychologist, former family therapist, and author. You can listen to the show here.

A few of my comments about going home for the holiday:

“Sarah Josepha Hale [Thanksgiving’s founder] talked about Thanksgiving as a time for hearth and altar. So it’s all about homecoming. And you figure when Lincoln finally sets up the holiday it’s a time when there’s a great hunger for homecoming because the country is rift apart.

“And I think underlying it all, there are two stories of homecoming that we run into at Thanksgiving. And they mix and they collide depending on where we are in our lives.

“The first is a story we know – Rip Van Winkle. He falls asleep in the hills for 20 years. Comes back to his native place. He’s a stranger. No one recognizes him. New lives all around him. His own home place is fallen in. Home leaves us. That’s the first thing we run into.

“And then the other story is a traveler’s tale. It’s a tale we tell on the road. Home is like the unchanging oasis. It’s never going to change. It’s where our youthful self still walks the world like some kind of spirit life. So: Home waits for us.

“So there we are at Thanksgiving and we hit these two conflicting stories: Home waits for us. Home leaves us. And I think we just ride out those emotions sometimes depending on where we are in our lives, who we’re visiting. It’s a very powerful holiday.”

TEDx — November 2014

Thank you to the throng of volunteers, organizers, techies, who put on TEDx and thank you Rosa for going lightly with the makeup and making funny faces as you looked at my hair. Each TEDx-oid (possible word? No. Tedx-ite? Maybe) — each TEDx-er was welcoming.

Howard Mansfield is a writer; one that writes of what we once knew and somehow lost along the way. When we read his words, we harken back to what we held dear, now somehow lying dormant for far too long. His writing resonates deeply, and we begin to wonder how we could have let go of what once mattered so much. He takes nothing for granted, and his readers reawaken to a very different world—their own world—viewing it in a new, yet familiar, way.

I am happy to report that I’ll be speaking at this year’s TEDxAmoskeagMillyard. The theme is “Connection.” “From our deepening understanding of the world’s interdependent ecosystems to an appreciation of the potential of intellectual and artistic collaboration, we’ll explore what happens when we connect: with people, with place, with ideas, or with beauty. If the Renaissance showed us the importance of the individual, our modern world highlights the importance of connection.”

A Wish List of Favorite Books by New England Writers for 2014. In the November/December Yankee, Tim Clark lists Dwelling in Possibility first in his list of favorites.

May 2014

A Moveable Garden is a thoughtful blog by a gardener who has had her hands in the soil for almost 25 years. “I’ve spent countless hours just looking at my plants, at the insect and bird activity on, in, and around them, and appreciating both the simplicity and complexity of habitat.” Right now this gardener is reading Dwelling in Possibility and thinking about it while writing about the essence of Louis Kahn’s great Salk Institute. I am honored to find my book in the company of Kahn and a good gardener. Read the blogpost from a Moveable Garden here.

Romaine Tenney in 1964.

I am honored to be a part of a reason to celebrate. Yankee Magazine is a 2014 National City and Regional Magazine Awards finalist for “Excellence in Writing” for the March/April 2013 issue, “The Power of Place.” Two of the stories in that issue are:

* My Roots are Deeper Than Your PocketsRod McAllister could have sold his dairy farm for $4 million dollars. But where would he be? He would have sold himself off the earth. Rod is just one of many in the North County of New Hampshire who are taking a stand against having their home cut up by the transmission lines of the proposed Northern Pass project. Read it here.

* I Will Not Leave: Romaine Tenney Loved His Farm to DeathIn the Summer of 1964 a bachelor Vermont farmer faces the new Interstate highway coming right through his house and barns. A tragic love story. Read it here.

In her blog, In the Sunny Spot, Katy Noelle talks about reading Dwelling in Possibility:

“Enter a fascinating and timely book that I just happen to be reading. It’s called Dwelling in Possibility by Howard Mansfield. It’s all about what makes ‘home’ and I am LOVING this book!! There’s history, philosophy and insight and it’s already opening up my heart and eyes!

“One of his insights/questions is, what is a house for? Is it a box to house a huge screen lit up by an electronic glow? Is it a storage shed to hold mountains of stuff? What LIVES in a house? It’s a question I’m asking myself – what lives in my house – and there are some things that make me blush but, yes – People! my family lives here!! and, well…. lots of plants. Oh! and books! and lots and lots and lots of china! ….

“But his point is deeper. We don’t live in houses – we live in our skin – in our hearts and minds and spirit! We spend so much time scouring magazines and paying for boxes to organize, organize, organize in a search for a better life, perhaps? But, it seems never ending! He says, ‘what’s keeping you from living? Throw it all away, step over it, push it into a corner, under a tarp, into the garage, barn, storage shed. Mice, rats, mold, mildew will have their way. Just go live your life.’ and, there’s so much more but you’ll just have to get the book!”

The pioneer timber frame builder and advocate for sustainable and soulful homes, Tedd Benson, has written a thoughtful account of how his company refocused its mission to say: Through process and product, to improve people’s lives.

Benson writes “The bigger purpose of home is to fuel hopes and dreams, become that place where people know they can find moments of quiet beauty and serenity, where the routine of ordinary and intimate is the essence of one’s personal sanctuary…. The quality of home matters deeply to people and even to civilization. Homes that do nothing for the human spirit have an immeasurable and unaccounted negative cost. Homes that do achieve this higher standard help to inspire the very best from people and make the world a better place.

He closes by quoting from Dwelling in Possibility: “We build thousands of houses, but only few homes. With the world’s population projected to double, we will have to build this world all over again. How can we do that and shelter the soul?”

January 2014

Dwelling in Possibility outsells Fifty Shades of Grey — at the Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough, NH. In a January 6, 2014 story, Publishers Weekly reports on an ‘Excellent’ Holiday for Many Indies: “local authors, frequently published by local presses, did well across the board. At the Toadstool local authors Archer Mayor’s Three Can Keep a Secret and Howard Mansfield’s Dwelling in Possibility were among the season’s best. The latter outsold last year’s Fifty Shades of Grey by 20%.”

The Post-Hearth House. A Boston Globe 0p-ed by Jennifer Graham looks at the diminished fireplace in our homes. Graham quotes from Dwelling in Possibility: “Putting out a campfire that’s burned throughout millennia is such a significant change that we can divide the history of dwelling between Hearth and Post-Hearth.” Read her op-ed here.

Book Riot Picks Dwelling in Possibility as one of the Best Books of 2013: “Howard Mansfield writes in the dreamy prose of a poet, while discussing everything from what makes a home feel like home to the rebuilding of communities after being literally bombed, flooded, or otherwise destroyed.”

December 2013

“The best buildings are the ones we can look at every day of our lives and still see something new,” Howard says. “They keep revealing themselves and refreshing our spirit.” That’s from the fine story in Michelle Aldredge’s lively, colorful arts journal, Gwarlingo. Read her story about Dwelling in Possibility here.

Just published in paperback. Turn and Jump: How Time and Place Fell Apart. (Rowman & Littlefield) ISBN 978-1-4422-2638-8

September 2013

New Hampshire Magazine’s September 2013 issue says: “Every book by Hancock author Howard Mansfield is a cause for celebration among thoughtful readers. His granitic epiphanies are as universal as water but as precious and local as a backyard well. His latest book, “Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter” (available this month from Bauhan Publishing of Peterborough), covers a lot of ground from an ambiguous critique of Frank Lloyd Wright to a chronicle of life in NH’s Great Ice Storm of 2008, but this opening to his chapter titled “Sheds” makes a great introduction.”

August 2013

“Go ahead and fail.” From an interview I did with Book Notes New Hampshire: Occasional notes on New Hampshire’s book community from the Director of the Center for the Book at the New Hampshire State Library:

What’s the best piece of advice (writing or otherwise) you were ever given?

Go ahead and fail. In college my friends and I read E. B. White. His impressive collected essays had just been published. We admired his work; it set a high standard. One day my best friend came back from the library where he had been reading about the essayist and told me that White had spent time researching a story about the United Nations when it was new, but he had set it aside.

That was a small revelation. Even E. B. White had started stories he didn’t finish. It’s an important lesson. If you’re going to follow your curiosity there will be many dead ends and wrong turns, but that’s all part of exploring the world.

May 2012

“The tyranny of all institutions is that they control time. Everyone is on school time or airport time. We wait and do as we are told. Hospitals are like that, but the stakes are higher. The first thing about hospital time is that we never know how long we will be there. Will one test or “procedure” lead to complications? When will the doctor stop by to sign our papers so we can leave? Will we ever leave?”

New paperback: At the End of Life, a collection of essays edited by Lee Gutkind, has just been published by Creative Nonfiction Books. Howard Mansfield contributed an essay, “Waiting (to go Home).”

Prof. Joy Ackerman at Antioch University New England is having her students read The Bones of the Earth and In the Memory House for the course “Making Sense of Place.” Howard Mansfield will visit the class.

New ebooks:Turn and Jump, and The Bones of the Earth are now in ebook editions for the Kindle and the Nook.

Turn and Jump has won an “IPPY:” Independent Publisher Book Awards, 2011. Silver medal, in the science category.

May 2011

Franklin Pierce University has awarded Howard Mansfield and his wife Sy Montgomery each a Doctor of Humane Letters.

Here’s what they said at Commencement, May 2011:

“Howard MansfieldAuthor Preservationist Historian

Howard Mansfield embodies what Barry Lopez has called “a local genius of American landscape, one whose knowledge is intimate rather than encyclopedic and whose writing rings with the concrete details of experience.” These individuals are uncommon, and we in the Monadnock region are privileged to be able to see our home ground through his keen and generous eyes. He uncovered and celebrated the distinctive features of this place as editor of Franklin Pierce University’s Monadnock Institute of Nature, Place and Culture’s anthology of essays Where the Mountains Stands Alone: Stories of Place in the Monadnock Region. He has been a founding member of the Monadnock Institute’s advisory board since 1996.

With deep knowledge, painstaking accuracy and more than a touch of humor, Mansfield carries us back to another time through his reflections and ruminations. His words allow us to see and experience traditional ways as well as the dizzy pace of change. We see through him that time and silence are more valuable than the things we often accumulate and become overwhelmed by. He encourages us to really look at where and how we live, and to honor the old houses that are ‘brimming cups of here’ where “house, land and people seem to be breathing at the same rate.”

When he first moved to New Hampshire, he visited the historic society in his small town and observed the items that this community chose for their ‘memory house’ — a tassel from the decorations of the late President Lincoln’s funeral car, a drum that may have been used in the Revolution — and recognized “here was a glimpse of a community in the act of remembering.”

Howard Mansfield has written, edited and contributed to over a dozen books about history, preservation and architecture. He writes of the importance of restoring old ways of doing things to “import some of the things we are losing daily: silence, repose, memory,” and “make time for being here – not online, not rushing to do everything.”

Because he has reminded us of what is truly significant in our daily lives, because he has traveled back in time as far as 10,000 years to bring his readers into the experiences of the past, because he has given us stories that capture the habits and hopes of our distinct community, and because he is dedicated to restoration in our throw-away society, Franklin Pierce University is proud, on this 14th day of May 2011, to confer upon Howard Mansfield the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.”

Exploring time and place with Howard Mansfield“Author Howard Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our relationship to the world.”

When ordering books please consider the Toadstool Bookshop. The Toadstool is our local independent bookstore. It’s a great place — you’d love to have a Toadstool Bookshop in your town. Order my book here and I’ll gladly sign it.